Category: U.S.A

The Silence by Don DeLillo

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The Silence by Don DeLillo

American fiction

Source – Library book

I have been trying ot pop to the local library a little more, get a few books out not always to read, but to just have them there, as I always look for books that have passed me by or I haven’t heard of when looking down the stacks at the library. I am lucky that Chesterfield has a reasonable library with a good selection of fiction so when I spotted this book by DeLillo, which I hadn’t seen mentioned much when it came out, I had reviewed another book by him on the blog, and when Underworld came out in paperback which would be about 1998 I read it for me that is alongside Mason and Dixon is the greatesrt american novel I had read. But I know Delillo has written some novellas. I  read Falling Man a few years ago. So I picked up his last novella to come out.

Words, sentences, numbers, distance to destination.

The man touched the button and his seat moved from its upright position. He found himself staring up at the nearest of the small screens located just below the overhead bin, words and numbers changing with the progress of the flight. Altitude, air temperature, speed, time of arrival. He wanted to sleep but kept on looking.

Heure à Paris. Heure à London.

“Look,” he said, and the woman nodded faintly but kept on writing in a little blue notebook.

He began to recite the words and numbers aloud

because it made no sense, it had no effect, if he simply noted the changing details only to lose

Jim and his wife are in the plane as all this starts

The premise of this book is framed around a group of people who are due to meet for the Super Bowl for a meal and to watch the match. The story starts in Paris with a set of Guests due that evening. Then the action shows the guest in the apartment waiting for a sudden blackout. A moment that causes absolute chaos, and what we get is the thoughts of the five guests, Jim and his wife are on the flight that is due to take them to the evening. Max, the host for the night, is a man who struggles when his access to the screen he is used to stops. Then we have Diane Max’s wife, who is a calming influence on the night’s events. Martin, a student obsessed with Einstein and the Epitaph of the book, is a nod to this, a quote about World War III from Einstein about how that war would be on tech. That is, the five people are viewed in what would happen if all of the sound tech were wiped out. Our depedency on tech these days.

Let the impulse dictate the logic.

This was the gambler’s creed, his formal

statement of belief.

They sat waiting in front of the superscreen

TV. Diane Lucas and Max Stenner. The man had a history of big bets on sporting events and this was the final game of the football season, American football, two teams, eleven players each team, rectangular field one hundred yards long, goal lines and goal posts at either end, the national anthem sung by a semi-celebrity, six U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds streaking over the stadium.

The superbowl is about to start as all this happens  anbd we see how the guerst react.

I enjoyed this; it is one of those what-if moment books, like Javier Cercas’s in his book Blind spot, the unseen action, like her, what is the unseen when there is a cyberattack that wipes out the tech. We have silence, this is what this book deals with, he has taken the Einstein thought on what world war three may be and thought what would happen in those initial seconds after an event like this. I have seen this idea expanded on in the TV drama Zero Day with Robert De Niro, which follows a cyberattack. So one has the events in the apartment when what Delillo calls the silence happens. I liked the use of the Super Bowl, as it is a time when a lot of American families and friends would gather for an event like this. But also in these days of tech, we would have the tv , the phone, a laptop, social media, all going whilst doing this, what happens when all that suddenly is just a blank screen? I liked the way he saw how the different characters all act in one way or another. But the horror outside is yet to be seen! I enjoyed this book, it reminded me I need to go back and read his earlier novels at some date. Have you read any of his early books? Have you read any other book that looks at an event like this happening?

 

The observable universe by Heather McCalden

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The observable universe by Heather McCalden

American Memoir

Source – subscription edition

I took a small subscription out for Fitzcarraldo and this was one of the first books to arrive. I have always found there choices of white books interesting and refreshing ansd this one by the multi discplinary artist Heather McCalden where she wants to find out about Aids as it had killed both her parents when she was young . Tis book is the sort of book I love it is made up of lots little vignettes that form a book that looks not only at AIDS the rise of tech and her broken memories of her mother.This fragment series of wrting is from an artistic mind as she layers one piece over another in the book. like her other art which ses photos this is a book that could have only be written by a visual artist.

ORIGIN

I was born in Los Angeles in 1982. In June of 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention observed the emergence of a new cellular-immune dysfunction passed via sexual contact. The findings, published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, cited an unusual cluster of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) cases as the evidence for this new condition. The cluster, located in Los Angeles, was formed of five men aged between twenty-nine and thirty-six, all described as ‘active homosexuals’ with no ‘clinically apparent underlying immunodefi-ciency.’ This was the first official account of what would become known as AIDS. During the early nineties my parents died of ‘AIDS-related complications.’

The orgins of Aids when it was first mentioned .

This is one off those books when you turn and read the first page it is likely yoiu could be sat for the next so many hours working your way through it what seems random thinks the sound of seashell then the mention of her mother doing the LA Marthon many years ago . slowly start to become like little mosaic pieces in the hunt for answers from how Aids start and was discovered the hysteria and homophobia at the stat of the Aids crisis. Then we have a paralell narratives around computers and how virus became part of the computer world. from the first networks how the us goverment built there network of computers. Then as it becomes world wide the computers. The piece I love are about her mom and the loves she had of crime dramas maybe  it is the fact I love nothing more than some escapism in a crime drama. There is a wonderful mix of facts and littel stories in thiss book.

A PLOT OF ATMOSPHERIC IMPRESSIONS

The stories of noir fiction are bleak in vibe with plots that never quite materialize. The reader is so embedded within the detective’s subjective experience of a case that a plot will only ever appear as a series of atmospheric impres-sions, which is a lot like how a city first appears when you drive through it at night, at age sixteen, not knowing what to do with yourself. The style and the glamour and the horror and the promise all streak through your peripheral vision, but none of it solidifies, becomes anything of import. It just remains a landscape to pass through, to pass the time away.

A thred of crime and noir fiction and shows thagt connect to her mother also LA was in a lot of Noir.

The world is connected in so many ways and this is one of those bokoks that has you thinking about the rise of tech and the internet and alongside that the Aids crisis that was happening at the same time as the internet firt blew up add to this a daughter seeking answers and as she does reliving memories you have a book that is a work of art itself . I was remind fo Alexander Kluge and Sebald at times. But also female writer like Olga Tokarczuk Flights or Ester kinsky grove which was about the lost of her husband in that book. I love this sort of book i feel it is like an art work the little mosaic tiles of the vignettes build a bigger picture when you move back from the book and  form a greater work.  A book that is part history , part memoir and part those little tales that aren’t quite history but are remember long after they happened. alongside images of LA . I’d missed this if I hadn’t got the subscription and I like it in many ways it is possible the best book I have read this year. Have you read this book or seen any of the Art she has made ?

Winstons score – A a book of little pieces that takes you from Lal to how aids was discopver and her mothers favourite crime shows thrown in for good measure.

Erasure by Percival Everett

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Erasure by Percival Everett

American Fiction

Source – Library book

I feel I was bound to read Percival Everett at some point in the next year, his new novel due out later this year. James, a retelling of the Huck Finn story from the point of view of Jim, the slave they meet along the way was on my radar like most of his recent books. There are few US writers these days that really grab my attention but his books over the last few years have been ones I have noticed and felt I would read at some point. So when I watched the trailer for American Fiction it made me want to watch that film I had seen it was taken from this book I just had to try it as it seemed a book I would love a look at being a black writer but also what sort of writer publishers may want at a specific time. I was reminded of the song about certain styles and ways the black community is viewed that Spearhead brought out many years ago.

Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison is a writer of dense, obscure fiction.

His latest effort has been rejected by publishers for having little to do with the ‘black experience.’ After a series of personal and professional tragedies, Monk sets out to write a novel loosely inspired by Richard Wright’s Native Son and certain commercial novels of black misery.

Monk has his agent send the manuscript, titled My Pafology (later changed to Fuck), around to editors under a pseudonym. Shockingly (or perhaps not so shockingly), his pastiche-cum-parody (reproduced within the text) is a runaway commercial and critical success. My Pafology is broken up into numbered chapters, the titles of which are spelled phonetically, and traces, in parallel to Erasure, the life of a young black man living in America. However, it deals more explicitly with the violence and turbulence of life in the ghetto, rendered in highly stylized vernacular and dialect.

Monk struggles with his latest book

Erasure is the story of a successful writer, but his books have stopped selling. He is one of those heavy writers with a serious intellect. His books are the sort that gets 5-star reviews in the TLS and then sells ten books. We know the type of writer they are, the sort I have loved. Thelonious Elliot, or Monk as he is better known, has been trying to get his latest book off the ground but to no avail. When he ended up seeing a writer with her Debut novel We Liv in Da Ghetto, I was taken aback by the style of the book she read to firstly The Wire but then to those Seventies blaxploitation films. But this book is a bestseller and lauded as much as Monk Books were. SO he just as a joke really writes a book My pafology about a gangster. As a joke, he submits it under the name Stagg R. Leigh. This is, of course, a nod to the folk song Stagger Lee or Stackolee as it has been called over the years. He is then shocked and dumbfounded at what to do when the book and film rights are sold for thousands simultaneously. What is Monk to do?

Mama look at me and Tardreece and she call us ‘human slough.’ That how it all start up. ‘Human slough,’ she say, ‘You lil’ muthafuckas ain’t nuffin but human slough.’ I looks at her and I’m wonderin what

“slough’ means and I don’t like the look on her face and so I get up from the chair I been sittin in and I walk across the kitchen and grab a big knife from the counter. She say, ‘And what you gone do wif that, human slough?” And I stab Mama. I put the knife in her stomach and pull it out red and she look at me like to say why you stab me? And I stab Mama again. Blood be all on the floor and on the table, drip drip drippin down her legs and my baby sister starts screamin and I says,

‘Why you be screamin, Baby Girl?’

The opening chapter when he writes as Stagg R Leigh

This is a fun book. It was a little different from the trailer, but it is an insightful look at the day-to-day struggles of a writer. it is a satire on the absurd nature of books and publishing. I remember not long after the first book came out from Steig Larsson, it was like every agent and publisher sent people to Nordic countries to sign up for the next Larsson. So when Monk writes his Gangster-inspired novel in the middle of a wave of books like that, it is sold regardless of him as a writer not being Stagg R Leigh. But it shows how fashion rather than style and content can now rule what we read where celebrities write novels or do they (I am pushed to talk about them as I haven’t or will never have an inkling to read a celeb novel, sorry). This is the reason I read books in translation. We get books from countries where this sort of style, fashion, whatever the fuck is popular this week movement is happening, most of which to me seem to involve people holding up piles of books on photos(I mean people that do this every day )  these days anyway personal winge over. This is a sharp satire about publishing and the struggles of writing and being a writer in the modern age of ever-changing Publishing Fashions. If anything, I look forward to reading his other books at some stage. Have you read Percival Everett?

Winston;s Score – A I will be reading him again which to try next ?

 

Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

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Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

American Memoir

Source – Personal copy

When I read the list of books I could read for the club 1962, I looked at one book that leapt of the page to read, and that was this one another reread. Unlike Kerouac, this is a road trip like his books are but this is from one of my all-time favourite writers, Steinbeck he just stood for so much his books we social commentaries on time and covered the tougher side of life. He captured an America that is now gone, and in this book he tries to do that. I do think he picks his tales here and it is, in a way, a modern tale. I love the idea of van Life is something that appeals to me the ability to go here and there every day, and this is what he did he took out his camper he’d called Rocinante after Quixotes horse. Now the companion for his trip was his blue French poodle Charley as he turns sixty, Steinbeck wants to see the small villages and towns of America before they go.

We didn’t give George any trouble because for two nights we stayed in Rocinante, but I am told that when guests sleep in the house George goes into the pine woods and watches from afar, grumbling his dissatisfaction and pouring out his dis-like. Miss Brace admits that for the purposes of a cat, whatever they are, George is worthless. He isn’t good company, he is not sympathetic, and he has little aesthetic value.

“Perhaps he catches mice and rats,” I suggested helpfully.

“Never,” said Miss Brace. “Wouldn’t think of it.

And do you want to know something? George is a girl.”

I had to restrain Charley because the unseen presence of George was everywhere. In a more enlightened day when witches and familiars were better understood, George would have found his, or rather her, end in a bonfire, because if ever there was a familiar, an envoy of the devil, a consorter with evil spirits, George is it.

George the Cat from his friends at Deer Island

The book starts with him explaining why he decided to make this trip a last chance to capture a world slowly going in fact, at the time, it maybe was nearly gone when he did the trip. He shows how he got Rocinate ready. His family wanted to go, but ultimately, he chose the dog as his companion and set off around the States. Nearly losing the camper and his boat in a storm on the eve of the trip, he sets off. He says he is just a guy, not Steinbeck, the famous writer but some ordinary Joe on a road trip with his dog. he notes how he uses the dinners and radio to get the feel of the places in Maine as he drives through this has one of my favourite parts of the book he visit someone he knows on Deer island that is the owner of a grey cat that is the least cat like cat he has ever meet harte people and dogs and make any guest at the house feel unwelcome even when he isn’t in the room. He meets migrant workers from Canada and compares how they pack the farm up to what English families did in Kent every summer when they went hop-picking. He likes to blend with the common man at truckstops, nearly getting shot, then having a coffee with a game warden on an estate. s he winds around the country, retreading ground in his old home of  Salinas, lamenting the changing country and the way it has become upper class no more fish guts on the beach from the canneries; he also laments the way this is the way the country ad a whole is changing as the freeways disconnect towns and everything becomes the same like the way people speak till he gets to  Texas where he notes how separate all Texans still are and how individual they can be. He laments what has gone from the America of his youth.

“I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox. But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.”

His thoughts on Texas.

Well, I could go on I love this writer and this book so much. I think he has rose-coloured glasses in a way and has picked maybe the best tales of this trip, but he has also caught what has gone the lament of the loss of language accents and identity between towns is all something we see more and more, and since his day every town is the same with the same shops and restaurants etc. What he also captures is migrant workers from those from Quebec to those he used to know in Monterey who have now moved on from when he wrote Cannery row (my favourite novel by him) . I must try Geert Mak’s book, where a few years ago he retraced this trip and saw how the country was now. This captured America before Vietnam, but post-Korea, that golden glow of the post-war years is fading. This is like a Norman Rockwell painting of a book, but you can see just at the edges of the images he paints the world he loved, and we get corporate America. I even forgot to mention the visits to the vet well that is for you to find out. Have you read this?

Winstons score A I love steinbeck and lament the loss of his world even if it is a bit overly romantic.

Big Sur by Jack Kerouac

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Big Sur by Jack Kerouac

America fiction

Source – personal copy

I had looked down the list of books from 1962, and I had quite a few on my shelves, so I decided rather than buy in books I had before for some other clubs. So this is a reread, a rare reread, but I read it in my teens, and I think I may have reread it when I got the current copy I have of this book it. I was a hge fan of Kerouac, but I tried last year to read a copy of On the Road I had been sent. Honestly, I just couldn’t get into it. I often hear people talking about books feeling different at various readings and ages, but I wonder if we grow out of writers. I think Kerouac is a writer a lot of males in their late teens fall in love with his sense of adventure and rule-breaking appeals at that age. His books are largely autobiographical, and this is the same with this book which followed three visits he had made to a cabin in Big Sur. He maybe managed to catch him as a writer with drug issues as, over the three visits to the cabin in the woods, he seems to have become more drug-addicted, and his sanity is drifting.

“And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I’ll do in three weeks only) ‘no more dissipation, it’s time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that’s it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony…it’s time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time…Yay, for this, more aloneness

I like this description of Big sur and the effect on him.

Jack Duluoz, who is basically Kerouac himself, is a beat writer starting to gain success as a writer and the pressure that follows that so much. He decides he needs to escape the city, and his friend Lorenzo (Lawrence Ferlinghetti) has a cabin in Big Sur, so he heads up there. He is trying to capture the sense of solitude and nature (I felt he was trying to do a  Walden in a way back to nature and clear his mind after the first visit we follow him back to the city, but this is a man who is starting to fray at the edges his drinking is increasing and mental health is suffering as he deals with his friend Cody and his wife Bily who is struggling with her own mental health issues. As his mind starts to drift, he goes back, but the other visit, the sense he got on the first visit is gone in fact, they make him worse this is a man struggling with the bottle and the pressure of fame. In a way, this may be one of the first novels that deals with celebrity, as Kerouac is writing about his struggles with the bottle and his own sanity at times.

Any drinker knows how the process works: the first day you get drunk is okay, the morning after means a big head but so you can kill that easy with a few more drinks and a meal, but if you pass up the meal and go on to another night’s drunk, and wake up to keep the toot going, and continue on to the fourth day, there’ll come one day when the drinks wont take effect because you’re chemically overloaded and you’ll have to sleep it off but cant sleep any more because it was alcohol itself that made you sleep those last five nights, so delirium sets in ― Sleeplessness, sweat, trembling, a groaning feeling of weakness where your arms are numb and useless, nightmares, (nightmares of death)… well, there’s more of that up later.

This quote aout drinkers remind me of my 20s I drank to much and now rarely drink but had times like these.

Like most of his novels, he wrote this book in a few days on a roll of paper like he did On The road. He wrote this book in ten days, and there is a sense of a man struggling with fame and addiction. This is maybe the start of his downfall. He died seven years after writing this book in the early sixties, but this was maybe his last great novel, although I do love his later novellas. Now I found this okay I wasn’t as connected as I was in my twenties. I feel now it is a great portrait of fame and the price of fame but also about escaping to nature to recharge all ring true these days. I had watched the film of this a few years ago, but I remember it being a middling film as there seemed to have been a few films around the beat writer in a few years. Have you read This Kerouac or any of the others he wrote?

Winston score – B the price of fame and its effects on your mental health captured in the early days of celebrity.

Fox 8 by George Saunders

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Fox8 by George Saunders

American fiction

Source – Library

I wanted to throw a few contemporary writers in English into the mix, so I started with George Saunders I saw this at the Library, and I have always loved books with an animal narrator as a kid from Watership Down, wind in the Willows, for example.  I often wonder why so few books are written for adults with Animals as the narrator. So when I saw this in the library, I had intended to read his Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo as I heard many people describe Saunders as a clever writer and a clever use of language, and I had wanted to read him for that reason.

At this time, Grate Leeder grew kwite sad. It was like he grew too sad to leed. And wud sit for hours staring into spase. It woslike Grate Leeder blamed himself that we had lost are Forest in which we had always lived since time in memorial. But we did not feel it was his fawlt. It hapened so fast, who cud have been grate enough to stop it? (I for sure did not know how to stop it. Once I snuk into the bak of a Truk and stole there hamer with my mouth. I know it is not gud to steel but I was so mad! But me steeling that hamer did not even slow them down. They must have had other hamers?!

Anexamplw of Fox 8 chatting to the Grate leader and how Saunders uses language.

So Fox 8 is narrated by Fox 8. As he says, he is a fox that has learned to speak Yuman from sitting outside a window as a mother reads to her kids. This a view of the Human world from that of a Fox and how they view us humans or, as he calls us, Yumans as a species. It is also a commentary on ecosystems and how we are ruining the foxes’ homes, and we see Fox 8 talk about his own home. This large wood had its heart cut in half as they develop a grand estate with a Mall or Mawl as he finds out when it is up from a Dog he chats to and tells him it is a Mawl as we see fox 8 wander through the Mall looking at how the Humans shop etc. he chats to the Grater leader around the events and the estate and the Human and its effects on the foxes.

Just then, a very Yung Yuman, a meer Todler, todled past with a smile of possibly thinking we are Dogs. There in her hand, we noted: some fud! It looked gud and smelled grate. It is a Bun! All of the suden, we desided to enter into a Fare Deel with her, whereby we wud share her Bun, by us taking it.

But then, quik as the wink, she is intaken into the Mawl, with one hand in the hand of her Mother and, in the other hand, our Bun!

And before we knew it, we too, lerd by her fud, had been intaken into FoxViewCommons, rite threw their Dore!

As he looks to see what the Mawl is all about I loved the use of langauge and his voice

This is a clever short story. It took me about an hour to read. I love how he gives Fox 8 a voice and uses language, and we know what happens through his eyes and the Yumans he sees in his world. I was primarily reminded of the great STUDIO ghibli film Pom Poko which used Magical Racoons instead of Foxes as through their eyes, we see how the Urban sprawl of Tokyo ripped apart their homes and natural habit, and this is the same type of narrative a world of Malls and estates replaces there familiar woods I said in the intro I wonder why we see so few animal narrators in adult fiction as we are seeing the natural world devastate around our treatment of the land and constant expansion and urbanisation;. Saunders has been very playful with the voice of Fox8. It hits the right key. You have him as a laid-back sort of drifter of a fox. He is a dreamer of a fox. This is a clever fable about the loss of habit told through their eyes. Have you read this or any other books by George Saunders?

Winstons score – B – A solid little story around the environment and our effect on it told from nature’s  perspective

 

Discipline is Destiny Ryan Holiday

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Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday

Non- fiction

Source – Review copy

I had forgotten I had said I reviewed this book today so I am back early it is strange that is a book by Ryan Holiday I am back with today. If you are not aware of Ryan he is the voice and person behind the Daily stoic podcast, YouTube, book etc. He uses the stoic philosophers and brings them into a modern context he then uses all he reads and has learnt over time. He has a great number of videos of his reading of the stoics and other books. Where he deep diving into philosophers. Making what the Germans call a Zettelkasten a box of notes. Then how Ryan uses notes to build the books he has written, This book is the second in a series of books he is building around the four cornerstones of Stoicism COURAGE, TEMPERANCE, COURAGE, and WISDOM. He has said he felt this was the hardest book for the writer as TEMPERANCE, SELF CONTROL, MODERATION COMPOSURE and BALANCE are such hard subjects to make compelling to the reader.

For 2,130 consecutive games, Lou Gehrig played first base for the New York Yankees, a streak of physical stamina that stood for the next five-and-a-half decades. It was a feat of human endurance so long immortalized that it’s easy to miss how incredible it actually was. The Major League Baseball regular season in those days was 152 games. Gehrig’s Yankees went deep in the postseason, nearly every year, reaching the World Series a remarkable seven times. For seventeen years, Gehrig played from April to October, without rest, at the highest level imaginable. In the off-season, players barnstormed and played in exhibition games, sometimes travelling as far away as Japan to do so. During his time with the Yankees, Gehrig played some 350 doubleheaders and traveled at least two hundred thousand miles across the country, mostly by train and bus

Yet never missed a game

From the first part of the book Lou Gehrig Baseball Hero

The book is formed in three parts and has a number of examples he uses for each part to try and explain and demonstrate Temperance. the first part at its heart is Lou Gehrig the baseball player (now I know nothing about baseball but he is a name I have heard of, he played the most consecutive games in baseball it is like me picking a cricketer he is a bit like Alastair Cook who played 150 plus test but more so ).Ryan explains how he grew up in a poor family. That it was his self-control on and off the pitch that gave him an advantage and lead to him being seen as an example of the perfect player to those young players coming through. Now the second part used the Queen which at the time I was reading the book was the time here in the Uk we were in the middle of mourning for the  Queen. I am not a royalist but admired and I value and sheer  WATY SHE WAs and how determined she was to serve. This is a perfect example. There are little snippets of her life. LIKE when Churchill first saw her, he was her first prime minister and said she looked serious as a child. It was noted later in her life when asked how many of each party had been prime minister under her she said it wasn’t a matter for her. Then Philip lost his temper one day she said look at the pottery he calmed but when the person looked there was nothing there it showed how she controlled herself so well a true example. The third part I will leave to you.

You could ayitwas in her from thebegining.

Churchill certainly saw it.

Upon meeting the baby who would become the great Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest-serving monarch and likely the longest serving in all of history, he noted, “She has an air of authority and reflectiveness that’s astonishing in an infant.”

The observation of Churchill on the young princess as she was then that became the Queen

Now, this is a change for me I was offered the chance to read this book and said yes as I am an avid listened watcher of Ryan’s podcast he is someone that just makes you want to think read discover. I wish I  could get some of his values in my blog more I admire how he took a subject like a temperance and built a guided journey through the subject that isn’t on the surface that interesting self-control, and moderation balance but actually they are Important how often in the books I have read books like stones in the landslide we see females show this stoic virtue when faced with tough circumstances. Have you heard of Ryan or his podcast are you a fan do you think the stoic and the virtues and things like Memento Mori still ring true? I do I often feel this is what makes me read world literature is how it opens are eyes to the world around us and connect joint the dots use what has been for now. Have you read any of his books or the Stoics?

Winston’s score – +A compelling and interesting look at a subject that could be dull.

 

 

Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck

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Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck

American fiction

Source – personal copy

I am on to the second choice for this weeks 1954 club and I go to America and John Steinbeck . I have long been a fan of Steinbeck I like of Mice and men at school and then in may 20s I read a few more then I decided to slow down and leave some for the rest of my life so as I turned fifty the other week it seemed right to cover him again in fact it was 2010 when I reviewed the Pearl from him here so maybe it is time to read a few more of my tar from him this jumped out as it was the follow up to my favourite book from Steinbeck Cannery row.What Sweet Thursday(the title is a reference to an old names for the days of the weeks so it is sweet Thursday after Lousy Wednesday and before Waiting Friday ). As we catch up with Doc  after the war as he returns to his home on cannery Row and sees a changed row but in some ways it is just  the same

Doc was philosophical about it.He whiled away his free hours with an unlimited supply of government alcohol, mad many friends and resisted promotion. When the war was over, doc was kept on by a grateful government to straighten out certain inventory problems, a job he was fitted for since he had contributed largely to the muck-up . Doc was honourably discharged two years after our victory.

Doc returns a couple years after everyone else

It opens and says how the war had an effect on Monterey and cannery row in either small or large parts this include Doc who was drafted as a sergeant in a vd section. He’d left an old friend in charge of his western Labs but when he returned he found it run down covered in mildew. he then discover the shop owner opposite we has changed but Mack is still there and they drink. what follows is Doc settling back into the row and seeing how the world of the row has change slightly since the end of the war. then a few chapters in we see Suzy arrive on a Greyhound bus her arrival which sees her end up on the row and at the Bear house where people notice doc seems to like here and this leads to them teaching her to drive and try to get her and Doc together bring him  some happiness but there is more to Suzy and we see what happens.

When a girl named Suzy got off the greyhound bus, she looked up and down the street, fixed her lipstick, then lifted her beat-up suitcase and headed for the Golden Poppy restaurant. Suzy was a pretty girl with a flat nose and wide mouth. She had a good figure, was twenty-one , five-feet five, hair probably brown(dyed blonde), brown cloth coat, rabbit sin collar, cotton print drsss, brown calf shoes(heel taps little run over), scruff on the right toe.She limped slightly on her right foot. Before she picked up the suitcase she opened her brown purse of simulated leather.In it were mirror, comb with two teeth missing.Lucky strikes, matchbook that said “Hotel Rosalie, San Francisco , half a packet of peppermint life savers. eighty five cents in silver, no folding money, lipstick but no powder, tin box of aspirin, no keys

Suzy arrives but she is a little down on heel her self

 

I loved cannery row the way Steinbeck caught those with no hope so well and made us feel pathos with them as characters so with Docs return after the war we capture those years between the end of the war and the baby boomer years. As we see how the war years has made some people not return and other let go and other come to the row. I said when I reviewed Simenon book set in America three bedrooms in Manhattan has a parallel in another way it follows a man falling from bed to bed and this is the row trying to find Doc a woman. Then Enter Suzy newly arrived from San Fransisco  and we see what happens when Suzy and Dc are pushed into trying to start a relationship. But as ever the `row has a nasty twists and turns to their lives.Steinbeck is great at conveying those lives on the edge of the society those we don’t always see in other books the gritty underworld of those just getting by where needing a microscope as a man of science shows how tough life is for even Doc. But what also comes across the brotherhood of the Row when Mack tries to teach suzy to drive or the way the rally round to try and get doc and Suzy together in air to help there friend feel whole.Have you read Steinbeck have you a favourite book by him ?The second stop on this weeks 1954 club and next we will be off to Italy.

Winstons score – A a gem of a story a great follow ups to Cannery row.

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

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Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

American fiction

Original title – Dove mi trovo

Translator – by the writer herself

Source – personal copy

Long before I blogged I had read the first book of short stories from Jumpa Lahiri a writer that has traveled the world from growing up in  London til; three,  then her parents emigrated to American when she was very young, her father was a librarian at the University of Rhode Island where she grew up she also spent time in India mainly in Calcutta where her family was from originally. She has lived in recent year in Rome where she has taught herself and started to write in Italian this experience she described in a non-fiction work in the New yorker Teach yourself Italian which is here. I had read her early works like Interpreter of Maladies and The namesake but hadn’t read her recent works but this appealed as it was her first book in Italian she had translated herself and it used one of the first phrases she learnt in “Italian” where is it ?

It’s hard to focius here . I feel exposed, surrounded by colleagues and students who walk down the hallways, Their movements and their chatter get on my nerves.

I try in vain to enliven the space. Every week I turn up with a shopping bag heavy with books from home to fill my shelves. That pain in my shoulder, that wieght, all that efforts amounts to little in the end. It would taketwo years, three, to fill the bookcase. It’s to capacious, it covers an entire wall. In any caser, my office is now vaguely inviting, boasting a framed print, a plant, two cushions. And yet it’s space that perplexes me, that keeps me at arm’s length.

In the office chapter we get the distance she wants from the world here.

So the book is a novel that is built from a series of very short vignettes of a woman that has no name and she is living in an unnamed city. But that means there is a universal nature to the narrator’s life and that is of a woman single in her mid 40’s a career woman but one that has apart from her work no real friends or real family so what we get is glimpses of this life from the mundane everyday events shopping, buying a book, watching people like the locals in the shop which could be a shop anywhere really. few highlights nights away in a friend’s empty house but no friend a visit to the sea a visit to parents all have the sense of a woman that has tried to make herself vanish from the world a silent observer of all that is around her.  What builds is a life lived on the edges how often will we pass a narrator like this a smart dressed middle-aged woman that has on the outside a career and a few friends or maybe people she has worked with struck slim bonds with but no real touchstones this is a tale of the aged that avoids the rabbit hole of tech in her life and paints a solitary as would have been called years ago of a modern spinster !!

In Spring

In spring I suffer. The season doesn’t invigorate me, I find it depleting, The new light disorients , the fulmating nature overwhelms, and the air, dense with pollen, bothers my eyes. To calm my allergies I take a pill in the morning that makes me sleepy. It knocks me out, I can’t focus, and by lunchtime I’m tired enough to go to bed. I sweat all day and at night I’m freezing no shoe seems the right temperamental time of year.

Every blow in my lifetook place in spring. Each lasting sting, That’s why I’m afflicted by the green of the trees, the first peaches in the market, the light flowing skirts that the women in my neighbourhood start to wear.

Her life in spring also reflects a sense of a life full of loss.

Now there is a difference from her ealry works which largely look at India and being Indian in America but there is a loss of identity of the narrator of her story that also widens the story as it makes it a universal this could be Rome,London,New York or Kolkatta or any large town or city there are hiundreds of woman like the narrator of this book that have drift out of the personal to merely live and observe there world live but on the surface never getting that attatchment from emmotions I loved the voice and the simple mundane world we had glimpses behind the curtain at the change of languange has maybe freed her as a writer to persuae a new style a different way of thinking having liuved in Germany for a couple of years and learning German as it was just by being there and immersed in the world I view the world a different way and this I feel in the way Jhumpa has approached this book she joins the cannon of great writers like conrad, Nabhakov, Achibe and Beckett the last name is maybe one I thought of another writer that had a detactched nature to his narrators like the unnamed woman in this story waiting for her life !! Have you read this book ?

Winstons score – -A would loved another 100 paes of this  but a great evening read !

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

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84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

Epistolary work

Source – Personal Copy

I sometimes like a change and like most of us book bloggers, we all love books that are about books and book people. Here is a great epistolary work that contains the letters sent and received from the 50s through to the late sixties by New yorker Helene Hanff she was a playwright her early books covered her struggling to get a foot in the New York theatre scene. Later she wrote scripts for Elery Queen. Marks and co a bookshop of the title based at 84 Charing cross road published and advert in the Saturday Review of Literature that they could get hold of ut of print books this leads to the letters that form the book as Helene a well-read woman had struggled to get certain books. I have tried to find the advert in the online collection of the Saturday Review of literature but haven’t found it just love to see the original advert.

14 East 95th St

November 18, 1949

WHAT KIND IF A BLACK PROTESTANT BIBLE IS THIS? Kindly inform the Church of England they have loused up the most beautiful prose ever written, whoever told them to tinker with the Vulgate Latin? They’ll burn for it, you mark my words.

It’s nothing to me, I’m Jewish myself. But I have a catholic sister-in-law, a methodist sister-in-law, a whole raft of presbyterian cousins (Though my Great Uncle Abraham who converted) and an aunt who’s a Christian science healer, and I like to think none of them would counternance this Anglian Latin bible if they knew it existed(As it happens, they don’t know Latin existed)

The Bible incident the wrong Bible was sent they later sent a better copy.

What follows is a series of letters that see Marks finding the books well FPD as they sign themselves in the early letters, Boks from the likes of Hazlitt Stevenson. The cost of these old but as Helene says fine books too good for her Orange crate bookshelves far better than their modern counterparts she has brought in the US. There is humor at times when they send a bible she calls a Black protestant bible and says it had ruined the Latin version in the translation to English as she said she was Jewish but has Methodist and Presbyterian relatives. As the book moves on Helene finds she is talking mainly to Frank Doel who is the main buyer for Marks and co. She discovers the hardship of post-war Britain makes her choose to send a food parcel from Denmark here she writes after sending it with concerns about if the owners are Jewish as she sent Ham to the bookshop but no everything was ok she receives letters from other staff on the side thanking her and wishing her well and looking forward to meeting her. But the main body is her and Frank as he hunts down the books she wants but life means she struggles to get to the UK.

Dear Miss Hanff,

We are glad you liked the “Q” anthology. We have no copy of the Oxford Book of English Prose in stock at the moment but will try to find one for you.

About the Sir Roger de Coverly papers, we happen to have in stock a volume of eighteenth century essays which includes a good selection of them as well as essays by Chesterfieldand Goldsmirth. It is edited by Austin Dobson and is quite a nice editon as it is only $1.15 we have sent it off to you by book post. If you want a more complete collection of Addison & Steele let me know and I will try to find one.

There are six of us in the shop, not including Mr Marks ancd Mr Cohen

Faithfully yours,

Frank Doel

For Marks and Co

Her love of Q lead to a later book I’d love to get about how Q influenced her reading

I love this book I have a special VMC hardback I brought a number of years ago it has the follow-up. The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. Which finally saw Helene make it to the UK. This is a window into a bygone world Marks and co is gone and most of the shops that made up Charing Cross road have gone over time. It’s hard to split the book now from the film for me though I did feel the film was well cast the humor of Helene that came across in the letters a sort of deadpan wit was well portrayed by Ellen Burstyn. Frank equally was played as a straight-laced English man by Anthony Hopkins. I have a number of books she mentions I have been a fan of Arthur Quiller couch or Q as he was known as the editor of Oxford book of English Verse which I have had for a long time as it was often mentioned on Rumpole of the Bailey which I loved as a kid. This is one of those books that reminds us why we all love books and reading and the bygone age when we had to hunt for books which we still do, well I do there are so many translations I would love to find like Helene I’d love to find an 84 Charing Cross road. Have you have read it?

M Train by Patti Smith

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M Train by Patti Smith

American Memoir

Source – personal copy

A change today I’ve been down a bit so when I read a bit about this book by the singer poet Patti Smith a week or so a go I went head and ordered it. I’ve listened to her music over the years and had seen that she had published a number of books that had been well received in the music magazines I read. But it was just a fancy for a change in my reading and it was a welcome surprise how much I enjoyed it. It follows Patti in recent years after the death of her husband Fred smith from MC5 it is also littered with her own polaroids.

Cafe ino didn’t exist back then. I would sit by a low window in Caffee Dante that looked out into the corner of a small alley, reading Mrabet’s The Beach cafe. A young fish-seller named Driss meets a reclusive, uncongenial codger who has a so called cafe with only one table and one chair on a rocky stretch of shore near Tangier. The slow-moving atomshere surrounding the cafe so captivated me that I desired nothing more thn to dwell withinit. Like Driss, I dreamed of opening a place of my own. I thought aboutit so much I could enterit : the cafe Nerval, a small haven where poets and travelers might find the simplicity of asylum.

Her she dreams of various cafes she has visited and read about.

The book opens and Patti drinks a black coffee at her favorite cafe where she is shocked when Zak her favorite waiter and maker of coffee is due to leave and open a beach cafe this reminds her of the beach cafe she read about in a book translated by Paul Bowles, we find out how she meet Bowles in Tangiers as she spoke in a conference about Beat writers she was friends with Wiliam Boroughs since her early twenties. This is a wonderful reflection on a reader and her love of books from Beat writer Jean genet whose grave she visits then takes a visit to Berlin and her love of Bulgakov on her last visit a sideline about various angels made me smile as it mentions that ode to Berlin wings of desire. Then another trip is Japan and Murakami a writer she said like Bolano and Bulgakov she got fully drawn into. Then she mentions the master of Japanese cinema Ozu and Akira Kurosawa via one of the few filmmakers to work with them both. Then a visit to Zak  Beach cafe a meeting with an old friend this is a warm book tinged with the memories she had with Fred as she revisits places for the first time alone.

MY BERLIN HOTEL was in a renovated Bauhaus structure in the Mitte district of former East Berlin. It had everything I needed and was in close proximity to the Pasternak cafe, which I discoverd on a walk during a previous visit , at the hieght of an obsession with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The master and the Margarita. I dropped my bags in my room  and went directly to the cafe. The proprietress greeted me warmly and I sat at the same table beneath the photograph of Bulgakov. As I was taken by pPasternak’s old wolrd charms. The faded blue walls were dressed in photographsof beloved Russian Poets Anna Akhmatova and Vladmir Mayakovsky.

Another city, another cafe this time Berlin.

A change but when you read smiths taste in books it is very much a reader I would share a lot in common and it also has influenced Smith writing style there is a touch of Sebald here for me it is full of her own experiences around the world as she visits various graves and thinks of Fred there is a sense of her love of books and life but also the sense of her own mortality which really touched me. Then there is smiths love of Itv 3 as a fellow crime drama fan I so agree wh=ith the way she just falls into watching them. Smith has a great chance to do all this as she is well Patti Smith a true one-off and has the chance to go place and see things that we don’t so it is a glance into a world that is unique. I loved her polaroids as well they speak so much from Bolanos chair to Frida Khalo crutches. Have you read any of Smiths other books

Lost Empress by Sergio De La Pava

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Lost Empress_HB.jpg

 

Lost Empress by Sergio De La Pava

US fiction

Source – review copy

I don’t often review non-translated titles these days. But there is maybe one writer I would always review it would be Sergio. Naked singularity was a great slice of modern America the madness and chaotic world of the legal system. So when I saw this book took two more uniquely American themes. That of Sport, which for me as a none American has always fascinated me the way the stats to these sports become such an integral part of the sport. Also, the nature of Franchise in sport is an American idea that I hope doesn’t creep into UK sport. The second thread is Prison the overcrowd privatize nature of American jails is also a trending coming over here.

Legless woman runs out of time

A Bronx woman, who a decade ago lost her legs following a vicious assault by her boyfriend, was killed yesterday in the apartment of that same man, when he savagely beat her to death using one of her prosthetic legs.

Miranda Johnson, 39, apparantly crawled on he belly to dial 911 during the assault, but was then unable to speak into the line provide any information. 911 operator 7744 was unavailable for comment, but her inability to procure the information is beinf viewed ad a proximate cause of the tragedy.

One of the 911 calls, this had a slightly dark humour to it.

The book follows two lives. Nuno DeAngeles An inmate of Rikers Island that has been locked up apart from Dia who is the Love of Nuno life. But she Dia is the deputy of the other main character Nina She is the daughter of a wealthy sports team owner and had been running the Dallas Cowboys where she had to lead them to a number of championships. But when her father passes, she is only left with a small indoor football team the Paterson Pork.he arrives there and we see a glimpse of Paterson a town famous for the poems of Wiliam Carlos Williams and the recent film from Jim Jarmusch set there. So when her brother no in control of the Bigger Dallas cowboys gets greedy and causes a lockout of all NFL games. She tries to attract the crowds to watch the less popular Indoor game. Then we have Nuno who is a criminal that is on the ladder each time he commits a crime he is going up the ladder of the scale of crime so he wants to escape the prison to get to the money that he sees will get him back to Dia. These three lives are a slice of the various class and worlds in Modern America. Nuno is wanted to avenge a death of a young boy and this is why he has to get free to avenge a mistake in the justice system.. He is a strange character he asks for the books the Tunnel in Spanish and Man without qualities in German when first in prison. Add to this a third storyline some different items like 911 logs, pamphlets. Then we have a thrilling climax but I leave that to you to find out.

What the hell is Paterson, New Jersey anyway? That the pork are based there is close to happenstance. Their original owner, Marion Bent, a highly respected Mobster who was dogged by constant rumors that he had ties to egtimate buisness, had essentially exhausted what little community goodwill there wasfor his Edison Emperors.One night, or early morning, under the cloak of darkness(a cloak that was entirely unnecessary as no-one really cared), he loaded all Emperor chattel, most of which had already been heavily lienedon, into several company trucks whose acquisition involved more broken thumbs than Bent’s nearby littlest league catchers Camp nd translorted everything north into the welcoming arms of the then-Mayor of Paterson

How the team arrived at Paterson could never see an English fooball team moving town but who knows it has happened once !

I used to want to try the great American novel and over the years have read books that fall into this category. From Moby Dick through the Great Gatsby, Herzog the rabbit books the epics of Norman Mailer. I only fell down of Infinite Jest which is a shame as this book has a sports theme like that one did. But I did read Underworld which for me was the great American novel of the later 20th century and for me, Sergio is writing books that capture the Trump world of America the overblown nature of sports is shown here. The nature of the world were sports is overblown run by money. I was reminded of the film Idiocracy where the sport has become primitive and overblown over time. Nina shows how sports are run and when her team isn’t on tv it is unknown outside New Jersey she tries to get the contract to fill the void left by the lack of NFL. Then we Have Nuno and his prison his trying to help his cousin who had lost his son and felt justice hadn’t been done. Again like in Naked singularity bring the cracks in the US legal system to light like the myriad of podcasts that have appeared since Serial first came out a few years ago. When books capture the Zeitgeist of the time they may be called the great novel of that time and maybe this is what Sergio is doing in his books. This has a lot of threads and isn’t at the time the easiest to follow but if you want easy you’d not be reading this blog or trying a 600 page novel about indoor football in New Jersey and a prison break from the unbreakable Rikers Island!!

The FENCER /l’ESCRIMEUR by Ayala R

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thefencer_cover_small

The fencer L’escrimeur by Ayala R

US fiction

Source – review copy

I was caught by the description of this book and by the writers bio ,when I was sent email about the book ,plus must admit always been beguiled by Fencing as a sport .Ayala R Finished studying at Stanford in the US ,then moved to the Europe he has lived in six different countries and speaks four languages .He was a competitive fencer and a tango Argentina dancer ,he currently lives in Vienna .

Every time Francis put on his mask ,it stopped being a sport to him and turned into something real :as real as it had been at the time when people used to demand satisfaction after witnessing their honour and pride compromised and thus blood needed to flow in order for offence to be washed away .

From the first match of the championship .

The fencer follows the story of Francis A man at the top of his sport fencing .He is competing in the world championship as the book opens the book unfolds on three levels the first is a progression through the rounds of the championship describing each match how Francis manage to win the moves used and opponent ,the second strand we meet Francis the man outside fencing in the present he is a man who has everything in some ways has nothing .We discover how he got to this point in his life in the third strand of narrative and that is the one of him and his brother growing up an overbearing father the sort that wants his child to be the best at the sport and thwarts his other dreams along the way as he loves playing the piano and would have loved to be a pianist .Add to this Francis has a brother whom like his self fell under his fathers huge desire for a champion in fencing and the honour that would come with that but unlike Francis his brother Germain stayed with the father not like Francis that broke loose but maybe as we see in the present maybe to long .

Francis and his brother had just been children when their father had decided that they were to learn the discipline of fencing .That was also the time when he had a fencing hall built inside the mansion because ,for him ,no fencing club in the region was good enough for his own flesh and blood .

How his journey began along side his brother as his fathers search for them to win “the big one”

I loved the novel Between clay and dust by Musharraf Ali Farooqi a novel about wrestling but also tackles similar ground to this book about the struggle to get ahead in a sport but also the fallout from such achievements can bring to the people like Francis involved in the sport .We also encounter father son relationships and sibling relationships ,what we do to make our fathers proud ,but what happens when we feel we fall short of the high bar some fathers can but on their sons .We see also the love and rivalry between  brothers which can ultimately drive one to the edge .Then there is the man himself there is often a feel to excel in one area of life or as a person can lead to a loss in another area of a person’s life and Francis is a perfect example of this .Ayala as a former fencer himself he captures the matches through the book so well you feel the adrenalin rush of each round ,the skill ,moves ,tactics and what it feels like to win a fencing match .It made me want to put on a fencing mask and have a go .All set along the background of the cities of Europe .The book has it’s own website here 

Do you have a favourite sport linked book ?

The Midnight swimmer by Edward Wilson

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the midnight swimmer

The midnight swimmer by Edward Wilson

American fiction

Source review copy

Edward Wilson own life reads rather like a novel when you read his bio ,he has served in Vietnam with special forces got a bronze star and ,when he left the army he decide not to return to the us but settled here in the UK and since has been a teacher in Suffolk .He has written a number of other novels .

Catesby hated his office in the bowels of the Olympic Stadium ,Berlin .There were no windows and no – gemutlichkeit .It was the German word for “cosines “,but the full sense of glowing warmth conveyed by the expression was untranslatable .It was funny ,though Catesby ,that the germans ,who valued Gemutlichkeit so highly , constructed buildings that completely destroyed it .

I choose this passage  as it mention words and translation !

Well I was a bit nervous as this is the third in the series of novels ,but it did work as a novel in itself .The book features Catesby ,he is a spy but not in the Bond mode ,no for me he fell between Smiley and Harry Palmer a rough diamond a working class lad that has grafted his way to the top ,but is no man’s fool ,Any way this is the start of the sixties, a world where lady chatterlys lover trial  is happening ,Profumo is unmasked  here in the UK .In america JFK and his beautiful wife have come to the white house ,Vietnam is brewing in the background and of course the is Fidel Castro in the background .Anyway Catesby is set on a mission that could stop the cold war falling further down the rabbit-hole into total chaos .This sees him go from Washington to Cuba .He has to meet a Russian who may have something to tell him  ,along the way he meets the Russian’s beautiful wife .He has a message to go from east to west .All this is happening in October 63 just before the events that shock the world in November 1963 .

Dallas . 22 November 1963 

They wanted to blame it on Havana .That’s why the fall guy .Lee Harvey Oswald , was told to become a member of the fair play for Cuba committee and to make a big show of handing out Pro-Castro leaflets .The truth was otherwise .The gang still wanted Cuba back and that was one of the reasons Kennedy had to die .

An interesting after word near the end of the book .

Now I don’t read many thrillers so being offered this book was a chance to go back to my past growing up we had a lot of thrillers in the house my father is a huge thriller read and I did read a lot in my late teens ,the ones I tend to remember had like this an enigmatic outsider at the heart of the story .Catesby is an outsider a man who has outgrown his working class roots ,but has it seems never felt totally comfortable in the world that surrounds him .I always felt he was a bit more sympathetic to the Russians than other character I have read like Smiley or Harry palmer .In fact at times I was reminded of the admiration Jack Ryan had in the hunt for reed October for the Russian he was trying to find . The world Catesby lives in is one that as history has shown if one wrong move had happened at this time the world we live in would be very different . So if you like fast paced intelligent thriller this is one for you .

Have you a favourite character from thrillers ?